I'll have to get back to you on the load figure as I'm currently "restoring" all the files from a network backup of my old machine over to the new one. It's going to take several hours and I'd rather not run any stress tests at the same time.

As I write with the CPU virtually at idle it's running at 41°C with the motherboard at 42°C. Of course the number that's missing there is the ambient temperature: it's pretty warm here in the office and as a thermometer in the much cooler hallway just outside is registering 25°C I think it's probably over 30°C but that's just a guess.

Bob.

Sounds about right. it's always 10-12c above ambient temperature. Just to give you an difference to compare too : On WC, I run around 34c on idle. On full load using everest 8 thread, I am runing around 59-60c. Normally on air you would get around 69-70c.

Well, I just ran Cinebench R10 x64 which loads the CPU at 100% on the multicore rendering and the CPU temperature jumped to a stable 64°C from its idle value of 43°C. That wasn't even enough to trigger an increase in CPU fan speed.

Actually I'm not too surprised by that as the Noctua NH-C12P is one of the best fan based CPU coolers in the business and it gets a good supply of fresh air to work with courtesy of the Lian Li case. I'm afraid I'm not even going to think of overclocking this machine just yet - it's too new and as the Asus EPU-6 engine applies an automatic 3% overclock at stock voltages when it detects high loads that will do me just fine for now. Hope those numbers were what you wanted.

Well, I just ran Cinebench R10 x64 which loads the CPU at 100% on the multicore rendering and the CPU temperature jumped to a stable 64°C from its idle value of 43°C. That wasn't even enough to trigger an increase in CPU fan speed.

Actually I'm not too surprised by that as the Noctua NH-C12P is one of the best fan based CPU coolers in the business and it gets a good supply of fresh air to work with courtesy of the Lian Li case. I'm afraid I'm not even going to think of overclocking this machine just yet - it's too new and as the Asus EPU-6 engine applies an automatic 3% overclock at stock voltages when it detects high loads that will do me just fine for now. Hope those numbers were what you wanted.

Bob.

I have seen people running on 4GHZ on air by disabling turbo mode and HT in the bios. I never used Cinebench so I cannot comment on it but you should try Prim95 or Everest. Are you using Realtemp 3.0 for monitoring or the Asus software ? If the later, you should use RealTemp in conjunction with Prime95 on Maximum heat setting and see how your setup is handle it. Don't be alarm, I7 runs hot.

I am not disputing their review but I have been around overclocking site for quite some time and the tools they are using for monitoring is not the standard. Either way, it does seems like a good air cooling solutions. When I first got my I7, I tried to run it as high as I can to see how much my cooling setup was effective. Of course, in real world situation. I would probably never be able to run a 8 threaded software that will use 100% of CPU because theses type of program just don't exist.

The temperature you gave me are decent for a air cooling unit. Enjoy the power of your I7, I enjoy mine greatly. I am even running Vista 64 without a crash (no small feats).

If you have an Asus P6T Deluxe and want to boot using a drive on the SAS controller and also enable RAID on drives connected to the SATA controller then read on...

Anybody still reading? No, I thought not.

The Asus P6T Deluxe has six internal SATA headers and two internal SAS headers. SAS drives are more often found in servers but the good news is that you can quite happily connect a SATA hard drive to a SAS header and it will work just fine. I didn't need a SAS drive but I thought it would be a good idea to connect my fast SSD boot disk to the SAS header and then use the SATA headers for a RAID array as well as an optical drive and an additional eSATA connection. The trouble is that if you configure the SATA controller via the BIOS to enable RAID you lose the ability to boot to a drive connected to the SAS controller.

This is pretty bizarre and potentially a show-stopper but there is a workaround. What follows won't make much sense unless you have at either a working motherboard or the manual to hand. The OS to be installed was Vista Ultimate x64. The BIOS settings are assumed to be "as shipped" so that the SAS controller and boot ROM are already enabled.

Boot into the BIOS, select RAID in the Storage Configuration menu, then Save (F10) and reboot.

Create the RAID array via Intel ICH10R controller (CTRL+I during the boot sequence) as described in the manual.

Reboot and go back into BIOS, select AHCI in the Storage Configuration menu. F10 to reboot.

If you need a RAID array on the SAS controller then create it by typing CTRL+M during the boot sequence and setting up the RAID array as described in the manual. Then reboot and go back into main BIOS.

In the BIOS Boot Device menu select the SAS drive (or array) as the first hard drive, then F10 to reboot.

Install the OS: for Vista, when requested, load the Marvell SAS driver. My own experience was that also loading the Intel ICH10R driver at this stage was a bad idea as doing so caused a BSOD, courtesy of the installed iastor.sys driver, after the first and any subsequent reboot during Vista installation.

Once Vista installation is complete run the Asus supplied Intel Matrix Storage Manager utility. I was really surprised that this worked as conventional wisdom has it that this fails first time around and a registry hack has to be applied before a second attempt succeeds. The newly installed Vista driver talks directly to the Intel ICH10R controller so, with the control structures already in place on the hard drives, the fact that the BIOS is no longer set up for RAID doesn't matter.

Phew! Quite a rigmarole but it achieved the desired outcome. I'm not sure why there isn't a BIOS option to allow this to be set up more easily but maybe some obscure incompatibility will appear and bite me in the weeks or months to come.

I used to install raid array controller that cost thousand of dollars and now you can buy a 300$ board and they come with SAS controller. Yes I got a P6T Deluxe but decided that 1 TB HD was more then enough and didn't need additional storage to create a Raid 0 or Raid 5.

No, I currently run a four disk RAID 5 array on the machine that's soon to be retired. That's courtesy of an Adaptec 2820SA PCI-X controller. I opted for motherboard controlled RAID this time as I didn't want to reuse my PCI-X card (avoid the need for a PCI-X capable mobo and more potential driver incompatibility with QuickTime of all the stupidities) and the ICH10R controller does a fine job as far as reading is concerned. HDTach 3.0.1.0 shows:

The P6T Deluxe comes with two Gigabit Ethernet ports, courtesy of a Marvell 88E8056 controller. In the course of decompressing a 218GB backup image from network storage I've had a spate of drop outs where Vista would temporarily lose the drive mapping. The Event Log shows a number of "Mac FIFO Status 1" errors from the Yukon (= Marvell) controller. I've tried installing the latest drivers, using the other port, removing unnecessary Asus supplied software and using a shorter Cat6 cable. The later seemed to help but even one such error in the course of six hours is one too many as far as I'm concerned. The network has worked just fine with other machines so I'm laying this firmly at the motherboard's door but with everything else working so well I really can't face disassembling the machine in order to get a replacement motherboard with no guarantee that things will be any better.

For normal network browsing and transfer of smaller files this wouldn't be an issue as Vista reconnects quickly but Acronis TrueImage seems unable to recover gracefully so I've decided to get rid of it in favour of Backup MyPC 7. I understand that Backup MyPC (horrid name) is derived from XP Pro's NTBackup, a program which many derided but always worked well for me, flawlessly recovering my system from two HDD crashes over the years. It was also very configurable from the command line which made setting up specific scheduled backups a breeze.

My second decision is to ditch the Marvell controller in favour of an Intel® PRO/1000 PT PCIe x1 network card. While it may not have the cachet of a Killer NIC, Intel have a reputation for rock solid network cards and this won't be the first time I've used one from them.

Just a quick update to say the Intel network card arrived this morning and I popped it in, deactivated the two Marvell LAN ports on the motherboard and booted into Vista which recognised the new device. I did a driver update and then copied a 211GB file across without incident. Sorted.

Frankly I don't know whether the erratic behaviour of the Marvell LAN controller was a one off, down to my slightly unusual configuration of disk drives and/or the graphics card being in a non-standard position or possibly even a generic fault. But if you have a P6T Deluxe motherboard and you see occasional networking drop-outs and associated messages in the System Log (Event Viewer) then I hope my report above and this resolution prove useful.

The idle power consumption figure is in, as measured by my APC uninterruptible power supply. I was initially a bit disappointed as, with everything including the monitor connected to the UPS, I was seeing a load current of 0.9A at 250V which, forgetting phase issues, gives a power consumption of about 225W.

Then I connected the monitor power input directly to the mains, so simulating the power consumption when the machine is in idle and the power saving routines have stepped in to turn off the monitor. That resulted in a load current of 0.5A indicating an idle power consumption of just 125W.

That's quite a difference but it is in line with the monitor's maximum power consumption of 120W (it's a bright 24" BenQ FP241W) so I'm chuffed to bits with this. ..Even if the actual power draw is slightly higher due to the volts and amps being out of phase I'm not going to feel I have to turn this machine off every time I'm not using it for a few tens of minutes. And when I ask it to flex its muscles it performs - the latest 3DMark 05 score of 17057 3DMarks and 14062 CPUMarks confirms what I'm already feeling subjectively.

Keep us updated, especially on the network card front. I'm also having problems with intermittant drop-outs on my on-board NICs, which cause shared folders to become unavailable from time to time - very frustrating.

I haven't seen a problem with Vista losing a drive mapping since I put the Intel network card in and I've used it to move some pretty big files around.

I have seen another hardware related issue which seems to be an incompatibility between my GTX 285 card and associated driver and Photoshop CS4. While I can enable OpenGL in Photoshop doing so means that the images don't get displayed. On my previous machine the same software and operating system were used but with an 8800GTX and OpenGL acceleration worked fine. In the grand scheme of things I've not lost much as Photoshop works perfectly well without OpenGL acceleration and I'm still hopeful that a future driver (or software) update will fix this. Just for the record OpenGL works without complaint in the few other OpenGL apps I have but I don't believe they mix OpenGL and GDI calls.

Update: There's more to report on this OpenGL issue but as this seems now to very definitely be a software issue I've started a thread here so I would request that any further posts on the topic continue there. Thanks.

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Another odd one today concerning the BIOS and its inability to see my USB keyboard. It used to be fine and the keyboard is also recognised by Vista so this is just a BIOS issue.

I dug out an old PS2 keyboard and tried that but the BIOS couldn't see that either. I was now starting to think I might have to open up the case and reset the BIOS CMOS memory.

I tried plugging the USB keyboard into various USB sockets on the motherboard but still no joy and in the end, in desperation, I even tried plugging the keyboard into one of the USB sockets on my monitor which provides a small hub. That last did the trick.

The keyboard was recognised just fine when I first started testing and configuring the machine and the monitor's USB hub was only added to the system quite late on so my assumption here is that if the Asus/AMI BIOS sees a USB hub it then looks for the keyboard there and if it has no success it just gives up.